I started with Hostgator shared hosting in 2007. They were great up until I started getting real traffic. Their unlimited plans do have limits - CPU usage and inodes. I then moved to 100tb.com dedicated for a year. Great provider, but I realized I wasn't a real sysadmim (a tad on the expensive side as well). So, I switched to a semi-managed custom VPS with ioflood.com at the start of the year which actually performs better than my old dedicated server. I also have active hosting accounts with hawkhost.com, sharkspace.com, and stablehost.com -- all great for shared hosting which I use for smaller, less resource intensive wordpress driven sites. But for real power, I choose ioflood. Hope this helps!